API Description Language for the Enterprise

REST, now estimated to be used by 90% of new APIs, is great for groups within a corporation that can engineer their API as quick as lean startups. However, REST doesn’t fully meet the needs for enterprise businesses. With their slow-moving review and approval processes, internal politics, and sometimes a large user base, enterprise businesses require an API that can be simple to manage, quick design process and also be able to use standardization across potentially hundreds of other APIs across multiple line of business.

It’s been more than a couple years now since we started to look for API Description Languages that can fit small to large companies. Anything that can help the communication between Back-End and Front-End developers to be fast, easy and standardized, it’s been something that we always strive for. Swagger and RAML, both are API Description Languages that meets those needs.

It has been suggested that RAML may be the perfect solution for designing the next generation of enterprise level APIs, but as you might know enterprises still using SOAP based APIs and, of course, WSDLs are still the king.

With Swagger or RAML, at the end of the day, you are trying to describe an API by writing JSON, and since it’s JSON, there are many tools out there that will help you generate these documents via nice editors (GUIs).